By Ebony L. Morman

In the historic Hoskins neighborhood on the west side of Charlotte is a distribution center. In June, Carolina Farm Trust partnered with Neighborhood Concepts to make the long-desired center a reality and a home base for the many initiatives of Carolina Farm Trust. 

Zack Wyatt launched the nonprofit in 2015, and is now building an earned revenue model to financially support the nonprofit’s efforts with initiatives like CFT Market and Catering and CFT Bistro, a food truck. While Carolina Farm Trust’s main goal is to make farmers money, expand small agriculture, and engage the public on how to support our local food economy, the food truck’s purpose is to generate revenue and then use those funds to support activities and services in under-resourced communities. They’re currently supporting World Central Kitchen’s work in Western North Carolina, too.

Four months ago, chef Ryan Allen brought his 20 years of culinary experience — including at restaurants such as Reid’s Fine Foods and Barrister’s — to the team. As Carolina Farm Trust’s sous chef, he splits his time between supporting CFT Market and Catering and overseeing the food truck, which is mostly at the Davidson Farmers Market and Muddy River Distillery on Saturdays. 

“With the truck, we’re a little bit unique in that we obviously want to be places where we can have sales and do events but the goal is for those things to be able to help us go into the neighborhoods where people have the least access to healthy food,” Allen says. “A big thing moving forward is just being able to take the truck to communities and show them what’s growing and what healthy food options are out there.”

CFT Bistro serves farm fresh food from the Urban Farm at Aldersgate, a 6.7-acre farm in East Charlotte managed by Carolina Farm Trust, where ingredients are sourced for the seasonally-focused and vegetable-forward food truck. Making healthy food more accessible starts with fresh, local ingredients. With CFT Bistro, the chefs — which includes executive chef Ryan Forte — want to show that this can be accomplished even by a food truck with a connection to an urban farm. 

“We’re blending fast casual with the experience of what you would get from a restaurant with things like tasting options,” Allen says. “We’re really trying to make healthy food fast casual for people and we want to showcase all the hard work that the farmers in North Carolina are doing to make our state so special.” 

Working with local farms means serving seasonal ingredients — and, as a result, a shifting menu. On the food truck’s late summer menu, menu items included a watermelon salad with pickled tomatoes and a fried chicken skin chili crunch, a squash salad tossed in a lemon vinaigrette, and a smoked and roasted chicken crunch wrap with collard greens, and green pepper peach salsa. The mushroom burger is also a popular item among guests. Now that it’s fall, a similar level of creativity will be present in soup and pasta dishes that highlight produce from the season. 

Allen’s love for food derives from its ability to connect people, allowing them to share a moment. For him, getting to talk to people about their days, and about food and what they like is a highlight. Those bonds that are created during each encounter — despite how fleeting they may sometimes be — serve as daily inspiration. Gandhi’s quote also motivates: “to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

“We get to be connected to people’s days, and lives,” he says. “Food is a huge thing for all of us, whether it’s a happy moment or not. I do think a lot of good times are celebrated over food.”  

Allen’s side work as a photographer captures those good times. It’s a pursuit he started when he took a break from cooking in restaurants for four years and it began as a place for him to channel his emotions. With this second creative avenue, his goal is to tell the story of American gastronomy, to show how people interact with food. It’s also about seeing food from the street level, which is apropos since he works on a food truck.  

“Just for a little while, I wanted to kind of step away to show why it’s so important what we do as chefs and what the farmers in North Carolina and throughout the state are doing,” he says. “It’s just another way to be vocal about the importance of local food.”

Despite a long culinary career, working with Carolina Farm Trust is Allen’s first time working on a food truck, and it’s a humbling experience, he says. There are more moving parts, which means your organization has to be spot on. 

“This is a fun experience to get to serve the masses,” Allen says. “In restaurants you sort of have one caliber of people that you’re getting to serve, but on the truck, we’re getting to serve everybody. And to me, that’s kind of a special thing.”